Officer Who Shot Man in His Home Indicted for Murder

In September, Amber Guyger, at that time a Dallas police officer, walked into the apartment of Botham Shem Jean and shot the 26-year-old to death. Guyger lived in the same building as Jean and claimed that she thought she was entering her own unit and believed he was an intruder. On Friday, a grand jury indicted Guyger on a murder charge, CNN reports. Texas Rangers had initially arrested Guyger on a manslaughter charge. But Dallas County DA Faith Johnson said at a news conference, the grand jury settled on the more serious charge after “we presented the evidence and we explained the law.”

The Texas Rangers “chose to file this case as manslaughter,” she said, per the Star-Telegram. “We did our own investigation. We thought it was murder all along.” Johnson said that murder involves causing a death “intentionally and knowingly,” as opposed to manslaughter, which results from recklessness. “At the moment of the shooting it was a knowing … offense,” she said per CNN. Jean, who was a native of St. Lucia in the Caribbean, went to college in Arkansas before moving to Dallas to work for PriceWaterHouseCoopers. His family filed a lawsuit against the city and police department in October. (This officer was fired for not shooting someone.)